How to Be a Woman

  The doctor then uses a vacurette to hoover my womb out, which is pretty much exactly as you’d imagine having the contents of your womb vacuumed out to feel like. In the months after, it makes me repeatedly demur from the purchase of a Black & Decker Dustbuster.

  The whole process has taken maybe seven minutes – it is brisk – but the longing for every instrument and hand to retreat from you, and allow you to quietly knit back together, and heal, is immense. You want everyone to GET OUT of you. Everyone.

  The doctor turns the vacuum off. He then turns it on again, and does one last little bit: like when you’re doing the front room, finish, and then decide to give the sofa cushions a once-over, while you’re at it.

  Finally, he’s done, and I let out an involuntary ‘Ahhh!’ as his hand withdraws.

  ‘See!’ he says, with a firm smile. ‘Not too bad! All done!’

  Then he looks down into the dish, which holds everything that was inside me. Intrigued by something, he calls his colleague over, from the sluice.

  ‘Look at that!’ he says, pointing.

  ‘Hahah – unusual!’ the other says.

  They both laugh, before the dish is carried away, and the gloves are peeled off, and the cleaning up starts. The day is now done.

  I don’t want to ask what it is they have seen. Maybe they could detect he was gay, even at this early stage.

  The best thought is: perhaps she’s hideously deformed, and I would have miscarried her anyway.

  The very worst thought is: perhaps something was struggling to stay alive – perhaps he’s running out his last piece of luck as I lie here, feeling pale as paper on the outside, and red and black on the inside, like bad meat. That’s the worst bit. The very worst bit. I wish these doctors would shut up.

  When they take you into the next room – the ‘Recovery Room’ – you lie, wrapped in a towelling robe, on a reclining chair. They give you a magazine, and a cold drink. There is a potted palm tree in the corner. It looks like the worst re-make of Wham!’s ‘Club Tropicana’ video ever.

  The girl from Ireland leaves after five minutes – she has to catch her bus, to catch her coach, to catch her ferry back home. She walks sore. It’s blatantly obvious that she shouldn’t have had to come to another country to get her life back on track. I wonder if the judges in Ireland have ever seen a woman as pale as this, counting out fifties onto the reception desk in a country where she doesn’t know a soul, and then bleeding all the way from Essex to Holyhead. I wonder if her father approves of the law because he doesn’t think it applies to her – and whether he would hate that law if he knew it did, and has brought her here.

  The older woman – who was crying, silently, in the waiting room – is here now, still crying. We all seem to have agreed, at some point, to pretend that we’re not here, so no one catches her eye. We just read the magazines until the 40 minutes’ ‘recovery time’ is up, and the nurse says, ‘You can go.’

  And we drive away – with my husband driving dangerously, because he’s holding my hand very, very tight – and I say, ‘I’m going to get the contraceptive version of Trident fitted, I think,’ and he says, ‘Yeah,’ and holds my hand even tighter. And that is the end of that day.

  Given the subject matter, it seems odd to say that this is the happy ending – but it is.

  All accounts of abortion that I have seen always had, as dolorous coda, how the procedure left a mark. However female-sympathetic the publication, there is a need to mention how the anniversary of the abortion is always remembered with sorrow – the baby’s due date marked with a sudden flood of tears.

  The narrative is that whilst a woman may tell herself, rationally, that she couldn’t have that baby, there will be a part of her that does not believe this – which carries on silently marking the baby that should have come. Women’s bodies do not give up their babies so easily, and so silently, is the message. The heart will always remember.

  This is what I expect. But this is not how it is. Indeed, it’s the opposite. I keep waiting for my prescribed grief and guilt to come – I am braced, chest out, ready – but it never arrives. I don’t cry when I see baby clothes. Friends announcing pregnancies don’t make me jealous, or quietly blue. I do not have to remind myself that sometimes, you must do the ‘wrong’ thing for the ‘right’ reason.

  In fact, it’s the opposite. Every time I sleep through the night, I am thankful for the choice I made. When the youngest graduates out of nappies, I’m relieved there isn’t a third one, following behind. When friends come round with their new babies, I am hugely, hugely grateful that I had the option not to do this again – and that that option didn’t involve me lying on a friend’s kitchen table, after the kids had gone to sleep, praying I wouldn’t get an infection, or haemorrhage to death before I got home.

  I talk to other friends about this, after a few drinks, and they agree.

  ‘I walk past playgrounds thinking, If I’d gone through with the pregnancy, I’d still be sitting on that bench, fat, depressed, knackered, and just waiting for my life to start again,’ Lizzie says.

  Rachel is, as always, brisker. ‘It’s one of the top four best things I ever did – after marrying my husband, having my son, and getting a fixed quote on the loft conversion.’

  I suppose what I’d been given to believe is that my body – or my subconcious – would be angry with me for not having the baby. And that, additionally, their opinion on the matter would, in some way, be superior – more ‘natural’, more moral – to the rational decision my conscious mind had made. That women were made to have babies, and that each one that is not brought to fruition must be accounted and mourned and repented for, and would remain unforgiven forever.

  But all I could see – and all I can see now, years later – is history made of millions of women trying to undo the mistake that could then undo them, and then just carrying on, quiet, thankful, and silent about the whole thing. What I see, is that it can be an action with only good consequence.

  CHAPTER 16

  Intervention

  I am now 35, stacking up decades as casually as I stacked up weeks, as a child. I’m stronger-minded, and more flexible in my emotions but these gains seem to have been made at the expense of my skin, which has taken on the slightly brittle qualities of taffeta. Perhaps the collagen is absorbed from skin into the heart, I think, dragging my finger over my arm, and watching, fascinated, how the skin herringbones behind it. I palm Cocoa Butter into the pleats, and they disappear. Hours later, they’re back again.

  My skin is starting to be … needy.

  It’s not the only part of my body that’s registering change. Hangovers now take on slightly ominous, depressive qualities. The awkward quarter-turn on the staircase makes my knee ache. My breasts start to need the underwiring equivalent of bodyguards – I must have my security around me at all times. I’m miles away from exhausted, and not even tired, but I don’t feel I could spontaneously dance at any point, which I often felt before.

  I’m just a little bit more interested in sitting down than I was before.

  The first big reminder-notes about mortality start to arrive. People’s parents start to ail. People’s parents start to die. There are funerals, and memorials, at which I say comforting things to my friends – whilst secretly comforting myself that death is still a generation away. A suicide, a stroke, cancer, these are all still happening to the grown-ups above me. They do not encroach on my generation, just yet.

  But I watch the older mourners at the graveside, in the church, in the crematorium that looks oddly like a municipal sauna, by way of instruction on a future event. Soon it will be me, dealing with these awful goodbyes.

  Soon I, too, will look down at my hands, and realise they are the hands of my Nanna, and that the ring that went on shiny, all those years ago, has – without me doing anything about it – become an antique. I have finished being truly young. There will be a holding period, a decade or so of stasis, and then the next thing that will happen is I wi
ll start to be old. That is what is happening next.

  A month later and I am at an awards ceremony, in London.

  This is where the great and the good of the media industry gather, for an evening of celebration, before going back to the grind of being great and good again.

  The pavement outside has a semi-circle of photographers, lighting up the doorway with their epilepsy flashes. Trying to get through that doorway when you are not someone they want to photograph is a complex and embarrassing experience: it is vital that you must walk towards it with a casual, humble-yet-busy gait – exuding the vibe, I am not a Famous. Stand down your weapons. You may safely ignore me.

  Should you misjudge your gait, and walk too confidently, you will suffer the terrible indignity of thirty photographers half-raising their cameras as you approach them only to lower them again, disappointedly, when they realise you’re not Sadie Frost. Sometimes, they even shout at you.

  ‘Fucking timewaster,’ one yelled, once, when I rocked up in a fake-fur coat that accidentally looked too real. I have learned since – a nice duffel-coat is better. Paps never bother looking at someone in a duffel. A duffel is safe.

  Inside, and I’d never been in a room with so many eminent people before. Their power exuded a low hum, like a BMW engine, a hum muffled further by the good quality of their clothes. The cloth was thick, and well-cut. The coats were Prada, Armani, Dior. Calfskin leather from the bags and shoes; hand creams in vetiver and rose petal. The whole room smells wealthy. It embodied quiet, unshakeable, English privilege. I had expected all of that.

  But what I hadn’t expected was the faces – the women’s faces. The men’s faces are just as you would expect – famous and non-famous alike, the men just look, like, well, men. Men in their forties and fifties and sixties. Well-to-do, well-cared-for, largely untroubled men. Men who holiday in reliably sunny places, and liked gin.

  But the women: oh, the women all look the same.

  The few women in their twenties and early thirties were exempt. They look normal. But as soon as the ages creep to 35, 36, 37, the first aspects of homogeneity starts to appear. Lips that haven’t worn down in quite the way one would expect – lips that appear to puff upwards and outwards, illogically, in Elvis pouts. Tight, shiny foreheads. Something indefinably – but definitely – wrong around the cheeks, and jaw. Eyes pinned wide open – as if they were in Harley Street, and have just been given the final bill for it all.

  There is an air that the Eastern European maid had washed and ironed their dress, coat and face, all in one go. That in the laundry room, at 11pm at night, these women’s faces have hung from rosewood coat hangers, spritzed with verbena linen spray, sleeping.

  As I look across the room, it reminds me of that scene in The Magician’s Nephew, where Polly and Digory find a banqueting hall, where an entire court – dozens of kings and queens, all crowned – sit around a long table, frozen in stone, by magic.

  As the children walk down the table, the faces gradually change – from ‘kind, merry, friendly’ expressions at one end, through a middle section of anxiety, unease and shiftiness, and ending, at the extreme right, in people whose faces are ‘the fiercest – beautiful, but cruel’.

  And this is what the women look like. Except they don’t seem cruel, or cold, or calculating.

  As you progress through the decades – from the jolly, untroubled gals in their twenties, towards the grande dames in their forties, fifties and sixties – the women in the room just look more and more scared. To be as privileged and safe as they are – but to still go through such painful, expensive procedures – gives the impression of a room full of fear. Female fear. Adrenalin that had taken them all the way to a surgeon, and a ward full of bandaged faces.

  I don’t know what exactly they were scared of – their husbands leaving them, the younger women in the room superseding them, the cameras outside the room judging them, or just the quiet, tired disappointment of the bathroom mirror in the morning – but they all looked unnerved. They’d spent thousands and thousands of pounds to look, literally and figuratively, petrified.

  So that was the day I finally knew, knew inside my bones, that surgery wasn’t the sane or happy thing to do. I stared at the results and they looked both unhealthy and unholy. Because not only do all these women look like they’d done something very extreme and obvious out of fear, but their husbands and partners and brothers and sons and male friends seemed oddly oblivious to the whole thing. They haven’t had this stuff done. They stand right next to them, live alongside them, but clearly in a wholly different world. Something ails – deeply ails – these women, something that their men have brushed off like bugs. As I have said, in the same way that you can tell if some sexism is happening to you by asking the question ‘Is this polite, or not?’, you can tell whether some misogynistic societal pressure is being exerted on women by calmly enquiring, ‘And are the men doing this, as well?’

  If they aren’t, chances are you’re dealing with what we strident feminists refer to as ‘some total fucking bullshit’.

  Because the real problem here is that we’re all dying. All of us. Every day the cells weaken and the fibres stretch and the heart gets closer to its last beat. The real cost of living is dying, and we’re spending days like millionaires: a week here, a month there, casually spunked until all you have left are the two pennies on your eyes.

  Personally, I like the fact we’re going to die. There’s nothing more exhilarating than waking up every morning and going ‘WOW! THIS IS IT! THIS IS REALLY IT!’ It focuses the mind wonderfully. It makes you love vividly, work intensely, and realise that, in the scheme of things, you really don’t have time to sit on the sofa in your pants watching Homes Under the Hammer.

  Death is not a release, but an incentive. The more focused you are on your death, the more righteously you live your life. My traditional closing-time rant – after the one where I cry that they closed that amazing chippy on Tollington Road; the one that did the pickled eggs – is that humans still believe in an afterlife. I genuinely think it’s the biggest philosophical problem the earth faces. Even avowedly non-religious people think they’ll be meeting up with nana and their dead dog, Crackers, when they finally keel over. Everyone thinks they’re getting a harp.

  But believing in an afterlife totally negates your current existence. It’s like an insidious and destabilising mental illness. Underneath every day – every action, every word – you think it doesn’t really matter if you screw up this time around because you can just sort it all out in paradise. You make it up with your parents, and become a better person and lose that final stone in heaven. And learn how to speak French. You’ll have time, after all! It’s eternity! And you’ll have wings, and it’ll be sunny! So, really, who cares what you do now? This is really just some lacklustre waiting room you’re only going to be in for 20 minutes, during which you will have no wings at all, and are forced to walk around, on your feet, like pigs do.

  If we wonder why people are so apathetic and casual about every eminently avoidable horror in the world – famine, war, disease, the seas gradually turning piss-yellow and filling with ringpulls and shattered fax machines – it’s right there. Heaven. The biggest waste of our time we ever invented, outside of jigsaws.

  Only when the majority of the people on this planet believe – absolutely – that they are dying, minute by minute, will we actually start behaving like fully sentient, rational and compassionate beings. For whilst the appeal of ‘being good’ is strong, the terror of hurtling, unstoppably, into unending nullity is a lot more effective. I’m really holding out for us all to get The Fear. The Fear is my Second Coming. When everyone in the world admits they’re going to die, we’ll really start getting some stuff done.

  *

  So. Yes. We’re all dying. We’re all crumbling into the void, one cell at a time. We are disintegrating like sugar cubes in champagne. But only women have to pretend it isn’t happening. Fifty-something men wander around with their guts
flopped over their waistbands and their faces looking like a busted tramp’s mattress in an underpass. They sprout nasal hair and chasm-like wrinkles, and go ‘Ooof!’ whenever they stand up or sit down. Men visibly age, every day – but women are supposed to stop the decline at around 37, 38, and live out the next 30 or 40 years in some magical bubble where their hair is still shiny and chestnut, their face unlined, their lips puffy, and their tits up on the top third of the ribcage. Sorry to mention this again – we strident feminists do go on about this – but Moira Stuart and Anna Ford got fired when they hit 55, whilst 73-year-old Jonathan Dimbleby slowly turns into a fucking wizard behind his desk. As Mariella Frostrup said, ‘The BBC make finding older newsreaders seem like the Holy Grail. But all they have to do is look through the list of people they’ve sacked.’

  Why the chicks? Why can’t we just loosen our belts, take off our heels and cheerfully rot, like the boys?

  My Subconscious Conspiracy Theory about age denial is that women are, as I’ve said, generally, deemed to start going ‘off the boil’ in their mid-thirties. This is the age fertility declines, and the Botox and the fillers start to kick in. This is when women go into their savings account and start spending all their pension to remove these signs, and pretend they’re 30 again.

  Given this, my Subconscious Conspiracy Theory would like to point out that your mid-thirties – by way of a massive coincidence – is the age that women usually start to feel confident.

  Having finally left behind the – let’s be frank – awfulness of your twenties (You had sex with Steve. Steve! ‘Beaver-face’ Steve! You had that job where you were so bored, you hid in a cupboard and ate small pieces of paper! THERE WAS THE SUMMER OF CULOTTES), your thirties are the point where the good stuff finally kicks in.